Question Apps moved to external storage still 'listed' in internal.

[monro]

Apps moved to external storage shows up as filling internal. Why?

I was told I could put apps on an SD card to save space on my phone so it runs better. But they're showing up under Internal Storage when I do an Analysis https://tutuapp.uno/ .

When I check the apps, they state EXTERNAL STORAGE.

So why does the phone think otherwise?

Was I misinformed? Or misunderstanding the analysis?

I tried a cache reset but it didn't do anything.

Samsung a03s.

 

[Mooncatt]

The ability to move apps to the SD card has lost its utility for the most part these days and the ability to do so has been removed in many phones. Even in the days you could do this, it never transferred the entire app. A part of the app must remain on internal storage (not sure why, but is what it is), and the amount moved varied by app.

The idea that moving apps helped the phone run better is misguided at best. It can help get around internal storage limitations, but the SD cards are slower than internal storage and hurt app performance. Android apps are constantly writing and rewriting to storage to record things like the app state, and that also caused a lot of SD cards to fail prematurely.

Because SD cards are best suited for write one/read many usage, it's best to store independent files on the card. I.e. Music, photos, documents, etc. The apps should be left on the internal storage if at all possible.

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! To add to Mooncatt's excellent analysis, there have been historically two ways to save apps to an SD card. One is to format the card to become part of Internal Storage, such that the system doesn't see the card as a separate location (called Adoptable Storage). This is somewhat risky, since if the card fails, that can cause the system to crash (and since SD cards are inherently much less reliable than onboard storage, this is a real concern). Not all manufacturers support this, including Samsung. The ones that do don't always implement it correctly -- we used to see a lot of complaints about how this works (or doesn't work) on Moto phones.

The other way to save apps to the SD card is how your phone handles it -- to move a portion of the app (typically just data files) to the SD card, while the essential parts of the app remain on Internal Storage. This method has been around for a long time, and as Mooncatt mentioned, the size of the app portion that goes to the SD card can vary, but it's often not very big.